“We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom”: Ursula Le Guin and Last Night’s N.B.A.s

Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, leaned hard on gibes about the irrelevance of the book world and the tyranny of Amazon as the host of the sixty-fifth annual National Book Awards last night at Cipriani Wall Street. Delivering opening remarks to his fellow literati in the blue-tinted light of the banquet hall, he observed that the N.B.A.s are like the Oscars of the book world, “if nobody gave a shit about the Oscars,” and imagined a telegram from Jeff Bezos telling publishers, “I’m gonna slaughter you all.” At the end of the ceremony, after the awards in the young-people’s lit, poetry, nonfiction, and fiction categories had been presented—to Jacqueline Woodson, Louise Glück, Evan Osnos, and Phil Klay, respectively—Handler consoled the finalists who didn’t take home awards with a reminder that “outside of the book world, we’re all considered losers.”

But if Handler made one too many cracks (including a riff about Woodson, who is black, being "allergic to watermelon," which has since caused outrage on Twitter), and Bezos got one too many shout-outs (guess which sponsor the National Book Foundation board chairman thanked first?), the spotlight was mostly given over to the evening’s winners, who proffered some urgent and eloquent thoughts about literature. Kyle Zimmer, the C.E.O. and president of the organization First Book, who was honored with the Literarian Award for her work on child literacy, told the crowd that “low-income kids are excluded from the power of books.” Woodson, who won for “Brown Girl Dreaming,” her memoir in verse of growing up African-American in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, said, “It’s so important that we talk to our old people before they become ancestors, and get their stories.” Glück, who took home the poetry prize for her collection “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” thanked her fellow-poets for inspiring “envy that in time became gratitude.” Osnos—who was up against his New Yorker colleagues John Lahr and Roz Chast in the nonfiction category—acknowledged the courage of the Chinese subjects he wrote about in “Age of Ambition,” who shared their stories despite the fact that “they live in a place where it’s very dangerous to be honest, and to be vulnerable.” And the Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay, who won the fiction award for “Redeployment,” his début collection of short stories, about serving in Iraq, described the book as his way of thinking through the difficult questions that confronted him when his service ended.

But it was Ursula K. Le Guin, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters early in the evening, who gave the definitive remarks of the ceremony, gliding through the genre debate and the Amazon-Hachette debacle on her way to explaining the crucial role that literature must play in our society. Petite, her silver hair shining, Le Guin shrugged and grinned when Neil Gaiman placed the medal around her neck. She said that she wanted to share the honor with her fellow-fantasy and sci-fi writers, who have for so long watched “the beautiful awards,” like the one she’d just received, go to the “so-called realists.” Then she continued:

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Even Handler had nothing clever to add. “Ursula Le Guin,” he said when he retook the podium. “That’s all I have to say.”